Today my project is rebuilding all the storage in my garage. How boring. So while eating an awesome “accidentally paleo” lunch of ground turkey, onions, and collard greens from my Purple DragonCSA box, I took a look at the Battle of the Paddle, which I guess is like the Head of the Charles of SUP. Amazing. A couple of years ago I decided to learn SUP because it was this weird new thing that nobody had ever heard of, but seemed like a great core training supplement for rowing. Now I look at the scene on Doheny and there’s thousands of people there. Great to see so many people adopting the sport, and great to see all these new businesses trying to keep up with demand. Perhaps our “jobs plan” should be to have Laird promote a new sport!

OK so as you know I am not 100% on the primal bandwagon. I take the approach as guidelines, many of which are both helpful and effective, but not as gospel. Part of the reason is that getting kids to eat “regular” food is tough enough, let alone lots of weird vegetables, and it’s not always practical to sit down to a family dinner eating a head of cabbage and a sweet potato when everyone else is having mac-n-cheese. I also have too many great Northern California years in me to wave off my wine. So while I like some of the recommendations from folks like Whole9, I am not going to be a strict adherent to their program.

But this is a great recipe.

We belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) co-op called Purple Dragon. A CSA is absolutely the way to go to get the freshest, most local, most seasonal stuff at the lowest cost. This means that every other week we get a big box of veggies hot off of a local farm. This creates some interesting head-scratchers in the kitchen with stuff we don’t normally cook.

This week it was acorn squash and onions, and we still have a million apples from a recent trip to a local orchard.

So I decided to try a steal-this-meal recipe from Whole9, and it was easy and awesome.

I made it with ground turkey because we just don’t eat beef, grass-fed or not, and I substituted dried cherries for the cranberries because that’s what was in the pantry. It tasted great, and the kids were into it because they are studying the Lenape native Americans in school and I sold it as “a meal the Lenape might have eaten” – native vegetables, nuts, and wild turkey (no, I know what you’re thinking, not that). Everything can be gathered, nothing requires extensive cultivation, milling, or specialized cooking.

You can pretty much substitute anything in this recipe – because you cook it all together the flavors get muddled and no matter what you do, it “tastes like Fall.” You can even add a few drops of real maple syrup (anathema to Whole9 but recommended by Food Renegade) to each squash to really finish it off and give it a rich flavor. Telling the kids there’s maple syrup in it and serving it in a squash instead of a bowl definitely increase the “cool” factor.